Pictures Show a Mysterious Planet Get More Surreal Over Time
Since arriving at Jupiter last July, the Juno spacecraft has been beaming back artistic and unusual views of the “king of the solar system.”
A spinning, solar-powered spacecraft has captured new images of the neighborhood’s largest planet—and wow, are they spectacular.
Since entering orbit on July 4 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been revealing a world coated in curling clouds that loop and spiral around one another, creating filigreed bands speckled with roiling oval storms.
Some of these storms dapple the planet’s previously unseen poles, and they all join the best known of the Jovian tempests, a splotch called the Great Red Spot that stretches more than an Earth across (but which has been shrinking over recent decades).
The new images “look like Van Gogh paintings,” says Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute. “I kind of expected some of this,
